‘Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’ Cliffhanger Finally Answered (Kind Of)

It has been over twenty years since the end of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and Entertainment Weekly has just spoken to one of the show’s producers, who revealed details about the show’s never-resolved cliffhanger.

Those details confirm a previous interview, conducted 15 years ago and published at KryptonSite, by another producer. The cliffhanger dealt with a baby, left on Lois and Clark’s doorstep in the series finale, with a note to the effect that the baby belonged to them. What came next, both producers say, would have been a new challenge altogether for the super-couple.

“It’s starting to get a bit fuzzy in my mind, but Lois and Clark became very attached to the little boy who began to grow at an abnormal rate, turning into a pre-teen in a matter of a few months,” executive producer Brad Buckner told Kryptonsite in 2003. “He also began to develop super powers, not all of which he used responsibly, since he was a troubled kid. Turns out he was Kryptonian royalty, stashed by his mother to keep him safe from assassins. In the end he had to (tearfully) leave the only parents he’d ever known (L & C) and return to save his imperiled people.”

Lois & Clark was made in the ’90s as, following the 1986 reboot The Man of Steel, Superman was more truly the “last son of Krypton” than he had been in years, with even characters like Supergirl and Superboy getting alternate origins with minimal ties to Krypton itself. The show also played fast and loose with comic book canon and often used concepts and villains who were either new or reinvented for television.

It is difficult to know, then, whether Lois and Clark’s Super-Son would have turned out to be some version fo Conner Kent (the Superboy at the time), Mon-El (a longtime Legion of Super-Heroes member whose history got impenetrable after the Crisis on Infinite Earths), someone else, or no one at all from the comics.

In the EW story, there is somewhat less detail to the plot, although more focus on character.

Executive producer Eugenie Ross-­Leming tells the magazine, “We didn’t write it as a series finale, it was just supposed to be a cliff­hanger. Looking to create obstacles for them, we ended up saying that carrying a baby to term would kill Lois. But as fate — or intergalactic justice — would have it, a baby of Krypton lineage is left at their doorstep.”

Per Ross-Leming (who also fails to mention the royalty angle), the writers had not yet decided whether the child would have powers.

Lois & Clark ran from 1993 until 1997 on ABC, and used Superman stories as a kind of pretext to explore the work, life, and romance of Lois Lane and Clark Kent. Many of the stories involved Superman fighting corruption and organized crime, elements that were relatively inexpensive to portray and which could tie into things the Daily Planet was writing about in the episode’s A-plots. As the series (and the romance) matured, Lois and Clark’s personal life took a more central role, with the two eventually getting married (and, obviously, Lois learning Clark’s secret identity).